The General Accounting Office blasted the Food and Drug
Administration on Tuesday for lax enforcement of rules intended to
keep the nation free of "mad cow" disease.

The GAO, a congressional watchdog agency, said the FDA had been
slow to detect firms violating restrictions on cattle feed, has used
a sloppy and flawed database of meat handling firms, and
inspected only 1 percent of the imported meat under its jurisdiction.

These problems and other governmental breakdowns leave the nation
vulnerable to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Dubbed "mad cow
disease" after it appeared in 1986 in Great
Britain, BSE has now appeared in 18 other European countries,
together with Oman, Canada, the Falkland Islands and Japan. The FDA
defended itself Tuesday, saying many of the problems
cited have been or are being corrected.

The GAO report also said that 1,000 cattle, 23 million pounds of
inedible meat byproducts and 101 million pounds of beef have been
imported during the past 20 years from countries now
known to have BSE-infected cattle.

The National Meat Association Tuesday said that these figures are
a tiny fraction of total imports.

No cases of BSE have been detected in the United States, and a
recent Harvard study said that even if cases are detected the chance
of an epidemic here is slim [There are serious questions as to the
Harvard study's objectivity--BSE
coordinator] .

That confidence is based, in part, on a 1997 ban on the feeding of
meat from cattle or other ruminants to cattle - a process that
scientists believe spread the disease in Europe.

But the GAO found that many firms are not complying with rules to
assure that the ban is effective. Last year, from 13 percent to 22
percent of firms were not in compliance with FDA rules.
The agency has issued only 50 warning letters since 1997, and has
taken no enforcement action.

"(The) FDA has not placed a priority on oversight of the feed
ban," the GAO charged.

FDA Senior Associate Commissioner Dr. Murray Lumpkin said new
evidence shows that only 5 percent to 10 percent of firms are out of
compliance, often for simple record-keeping errors.

However, the GAO's report said the FDA's database of firms
handling restricted meat is "so severely flawed that - until
corrected - it should not be used to assess compliance."

Lumpkin agreed that the database has had serious problems because
it was adapted from one being used for other purposes when the feed
ban went into effect. "We had to use the system we
had," Lumpkin said. However, he said, a new system will come online
on April 15.

Lumpkin defended the FDA's enforcement actions by saying the
agency first wanted to educate the industry, not hammer it. He said
the FDA is now geared up to be more aggressive.

He said it is in the interest of meat handling companies to be
resolute in guarding the $56 billion industry. "It is they who will
suffer if we ever have BSE in the United States," Lumpkin said.

Scientists and government officials in Great Britain assured the
public that the inevitably fatal disease believed caused by a
deformed protein could not jump from cattle to humans. But in
1996, chagrined officials announced that in 10 cases it had.

To date, 121 people have contracted the disease, 106 of them in
Great Britain. Only a few remain alive.

The "mad cow" scare decimated the cattle industry in Great
Britain, where over 4.5 million cows were slaughtered to try to
contain the epidemic. A few cases in cattle in Japan - thought to
have been caused by cattle feed imported from England - have slashed
meat consumption and sparked a government scandal.

The GAO report also faulted the U.S. Department of Agriculture for
not testing more cattle for evidence of BSE. In Europe, over 5
million cow brains
have been examined for BSE, while in America only about 20,000.
[Europe has less than half the cattle we do, and last year alone
tested over 7 million cattle for mad cow disease. That's compared to
our 5000 last year. You can't find what you're not looking hard
enough for--BSE
coordinator] A disease in
the same class as BSE, chronic wasting disease, afflicts free-ranging
deer and elk in northeastern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming. New
cases in deer have recently been detected in
Nebraska and South Dakota as well as in ranched elk herds in several
states and Canada.

Scientists say there is no evidence that CWD can infect humans
[There is evidence
that CWD prions can infect human brain tissue--BSE
coordinator].

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